Ordinary People

An Edward Hopper retrospective.

Why buck crowds to attend the big Edward Hopper retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston? Don’t we know this artist well enough by now? When I want to commune with “Nighthawks” (1942) again, I can do so quite satisfactorily at my dentist’s office, where, from a framed poster, the beaky dude and the bony dame at the wee-hours diner convey that root-canal surgery may not rate all that high on the scale of human tribulations. In fact, Hoppers in the flesh add remarkably small increments of pleasure and meaning to Hoppers in reproduction. The scale of the paintings is indifferent, in the way of graphic art. Their drawing is graceless, their colors acrid, and their brushstrokes numb. Anti-Baroque, they are the same thing when looked at up close and when seen from afar. I believe that Hopper painted with reproducibility on his mind, as a new function and fate of images in his time. This is part of what makes him modern—and persistently misunderstood, by detractors, as merely an illustrator. If “Nighthawks” is an illustration, a kick in the head is a lullaby.

A visual bard of ordinary life, Hopper imposed a thudding ordinariness on painting. The strangeness of this quality must be contemplated directly, and in quantity, for its radical character to register at full force. It is the basis of his universal accessibility. Laying the cards of his intention face up, it inspires rare trust, which steadies our minds to receive the living truths that the pictures tell. Hopper stands with two other American artists, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, whose likewise monumental styles also trashed prevailing conventions of good painting and have proved to be deathless.

The Boston show is so comprehensive a gathering of Hopper’s greatest hits—each a world, created ex nihilo—that it may best be described by what little it lacks, in that regard. I miss about a half-dozen favorites, including “Pennsylvania Coal Town” (1947)—a geeky-looking guy with a rake in late-afternoon sunlight between two old town houses, seemingly glimpsed from a passing car—and “Office in a Small City” (1953): a young man at a desk in a large-windowed corner office like an abstracted control tower, seen from an impossible point of view in the air outside. Both characters appear to daydream, absenting themselves from themselves, as people by Hopper do. Those are relatively late works, from the twenty-some ever less prolific and consistent (but underrated) years before the artist’s death, at the age of eighty-four, in 1967. One of the show’s curators, Carol Troyen, has deëmphasized that period as well as the busy phases, before the early nineteen-twenties, of Hopper’s long maturation, during which he practiced variants of Impressionism and, to support himself, worked unhappily as an illustrator. While including a great many of the watercolors, of New England places, at which he excelled—with light-struck, massy, hardly watery effects, even when they depict water—Troyen scants the revealing drawings with which he painstakingly evolved his painted compositions. This is an occasion for exploring not what Hopper was for himself but what he is for us.

There isn’t a lot to know about him, anyhow. Born in Nyack, New York, the son of a drygoods merchant, Hopper studied with Robert Henri and made three sojourns to Europe. He was almost six feet five, and taciturn. In 1924, when a show of watercolors brought him his first success, he married Josephine Verstille Nivison, a disappointed painter and his lively, obstreperous partner for life. She both resented and defended him. She insisted on being the model for nearly all his paintings of women. Childless, they lived on the top floor of a town house on Washington Square and, starting in 1934, spent nearly half their time in a starkly isolated house on Cape Cod. (Hopper seems to have liked places possessed of what might be termed negative feng-shui.) The couple read voraciously, often in French, and were compulsive moviegoers. Hopper portrayed himself and Jo in “Two Comedians” (1965-66), a late painting which is not in the show, as commedia-dell’arte clowns taking a farewell bow.

A good way to grasp Hopper paintings is to sketch them—never mind if, like me, you can’t draw. Just get the main shapes, including those of empty space, and how they nest together in the pictorial rectangle. Hopper bets everything on composition, which, in his work, is almost as tautly considered as in a Mondrian. (He didn’t so much hold back from modernism, from which he took what he needed, as see beyond it. He objected to abstraction only as Picasso did, for its limits on emotional engagement.) Hopper’s means are light and shadow, which establish the masses and the relative locations of forms. Raking light is the active element in static situations, as a stand-in for the artist, who inhabits his works everywhere and nowhere, like God. The light’s authority overrules worries about clotted textures and gawky contours. A wall or an arm is exactly as it is because the light, hitting it, says so.

Hopper’s is an art of illuminated outsides that bespeak important insides. He vivifies impenetrable privacies. Notice how seldom he gives houses visible or, if visible, usable-looking doors; but the windows are alive. His preoccupied people will neither confirm nor deny any fantasy they stir; their intensity of being defeats conjecture. Imputations, to them, of “loneliness” are sentimental projections by viewers who ought to look harder. They may not have lives you envy, but they live them without complaint. Another mistake that some observers make is to quibble with Hopper’s crudeness, notably in his renderings of flesh and foliage. His insults to taste are even instrumental to his art, focussing attention on what matters, which is drama. Clement Greenberg got it right when he remarked that if Hopper “were a better painter, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist.”

There are Hoppers that don’t work, while others, in instructive ways, work somewhat too well. I have in mind “Office at Night” (1940), in which a preposterously voluptuous secretary at a filing cabinet eyes a piece of paper on the floor as her handsome boss reads a document at his desk. The light denotes sunset. A summer wind disturbs the shade at an open window. For me, the dancing pull cord of the shade is one of the choicest details in art history, as an objective correlative, in T. S. Eliot’s sense, of “memory and desire.” Seen from an elevated point of view, the wonderfully articulated lines and contents of the space cant toward the window. I just wish the office were empty. What will happen between the characters touched by the melancholy and erotic breeze? I don’t care. They are types from central casting in an overly explicit cinematic narrative, such as Hopper commonly subsumed to his vision.

Consider his second-most-powerful image, after “Nighthawks”: “New York Movie” (1939). In a corner of an ornate theatre, a pretty usherette leans back against a wall out of sight of a screen that displays an illegible fragment of black-and-white movie, watched by two solitary people. Dimmed, reddish lights oppose a russet cast to inky shadows. Parted red curtains frame a stairway to the balcony. The usherette’s reverie, if any (she may be dozing), centers our involvement. She has seen the film. Wanting to be elsewhere, she is elsewhere. Where are we? I think we are in Plato’s Cave, perceiving layered dispositions of reality—those of the movie, the audience, the usherette, the theatre, and the civilization that must have theatres. I comprehend the picture’s economy when I imagine something that is necessarily absent from it: noise, the clamor of a soundtrack that fills the space and assaults the usherette’s unwilling ears. Life goes on? No, it roars on, indifferent to all who have temporary shares in it. We exist in the middle of a rush so constant that it resembles stillness. ♦

Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic.